Use different word lists for scoring

[jonc125]

Neil suggested looking into the list of words known by a typical 12 year-old, and similar lists.

[jonc125]

http://testyourvocab.com/details has some interesting information but haven't found an easy-to-use list yet.

[jonc125]

It suggests http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/bnc-readme.html, from the British National Corpus.

You'll probably want the lemma.num file, for the first 6,000 or so words. If you're looking for more advanced English, you'll probably want the all.num.o5 file, which contains more than 200,000 entries (although many of them are redundant).

However there's no copyright notice on it, so while there's an implication of public domain it's a grey area, and the author is now dead.

Or there's http://wordlist.aspell.net/12dicts-readme/ which is part public domain and part use-with-attribution.

[jonc125]

Neil suggested:

• http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/lever/ - corpus of children's writing. We would need to lemmatise it.
• http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/05/which-words-do-children-use-in-their-writing/ - but I can't find an actual word list

[ejh243]

The basic english used by wikipedia: http://ogden.basic-english.org/words.html